OUGN 2012 Third Day March 26, 2012

The last day of the three (and second on the ferry and of the conference proper) had a lot of talks I wanted to see, especially Dan Morgan talking about “Insanely large Databases”. It was a good talk, with an interesting interlude when a very loud announcement let us know we had docked at Kiel. Dan handled it with aplomb. Dan was talking about one specific experience he had suffered recently and he covered quite a few things I did and some I planned to but never got that far – but he had more technical details about the issues he had encountered, so all in all probably of more immediate use to the audience than my talk. It was a very good session. I have to confess, there were times I laughed out loud as memories flooded in, prompted by his wise words – I fear others may have interpreted differently but, honestly, I was laughing tears of shared pain.

I was also looking forward to seeing Uwe Hesse talk about Dataguard. I’d had the pleasure of spending a lot of time and a few beers chatting with Uwe over the last few days. His presentation was very well done (as it should be, he’s a professional trainer! He exceeded my expectations, though). And I loved the last bit, where he demonstrated how, under 11G R2 (R1 as well???), if you have a physical standby, a block corruption can be fixed “on the fly” and invisibly to the end user. I just love that feature and, though I knew about it already, seeing it demonstrated and the errors appearing in the alert log – though the user query runs fine – was sweet.

The rest of the sessions I saw were also good {Maria Colgan on preventing sub-optimal plans which was, mostly, about avoiding implicit data conversions, which I think all developers and designers should have drummed into their heads with rubber hammers; Doug Burns on those OEM performance graphs which continue to get better and better} – but I had to given in and go for a sleep. These anti-seasickness pills seem to work but make me dozy. I’d love it if those anti-travel-sickness pills were really placebos and I had a placebo side effect🙂

The last day was rounded off with a nice meal and one or two (or three, or four) beers in a bar and some excellent times. I of course spent time with the Other Martins (we could not disband the cluster too easily), Doug, Holger, Maria, our Norwegian hosts and many more of the other people there. If only I had managed to fit in the other 10, 15 people I wanted to see but I’m getting old and I was very, very, very tired.

I have to say, it was one of the best conferences I have ever been to. OUGN 2013? Get yourself on that boat.